With Playstation Network still offline, Sony is strongly pointing the finger at Anonymous, an internet hacking group. If you are unfamiliar with the group, they are recently known for attacking the Sony website in response to the lawsuit against George Hotz, who was able to hack into the Playstaion 3, and record the process on his blog. Although they admit to the website attack, they deny any involvement into the disastrous outage of the Playstation Network, which was hacked, with over 77 million user information being stolen. However, they have problems of their own.
Over the weekend, Anonymous’ IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server, AnonOps, was hit by a “denial-of-service” attack. It ended with some of the IRC servers being taken over. They come to find out that the person who caused the attack was one of their own. His name is “Ryan,” who was a former IRC Operator.
While it is unclear as to the reasons why he attacked the group, but some suggest that Ryan was power-hungry and wanted to take control of AnonOps. Another suggestion is that he was not happy with the structure of the leadership. It is believed that Ryan favored the idea proving yourself before being able to take advantage of tools like “Low Orbit Ion Cannon,’ which is an open source network attack application; the “denial-of-service” is a LOIC tool.
What is causing the alienation between Anonymous and AnonOps IRC servers? A few Anonymous members argued that the owners of the AnonOps IRC servers, and the tools they use, were starting to suffer a slight case of megalomania, seeing as their names were bouncing around the internet. There were also accusations of the small group making all of the decisions about who Anonymous would attack without involving the rest of the group in them.
Since the IRC used to discuss plans for their activities, AnonOps are going to have to find another means of communication to talk about their devious plans. If they are looking for any suggestions, might I suggest GoToMeeting.com